Has Waiting for Things Become the Ultimate Luxury?

A photograph from the artist Uta Barth’s 1997 portfolio “... in passing.”CreditCourtesy of the artist; 1301 Pe, Los Angeles; and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm

In the Tudor era, a lady-in-waiting provided “noble counsel” to the queen and could become the king’s mistress or even, after a clutch beheading, the king’s new wife. “In waiting” status gave such a woman access, power, clout. Meaning, even to be granted the opportunity to wait — to be possibly married to the king and maybe subsequently beheaded — was considered a great privilege.

Since those days, however, not waiting — at all, for anything — has been the far more potent status signifier. People tell stories about waiting if they want to underscore their mettle or their patience; people tell stories about not waiting if they want to brag about their wealth or power or connectedness. They tell stories of taking the Concorde to Europe (when there was a Concorde). They tell of swift V.I.P. entry to a sold-out Beyoncé concert, where 45,000 commoners thronged at the gates. They recount skipping an endless line of tourists at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence because a culturally influential Italian bestowed upon them a special-access card.

Actually, that person skipping the line at the Uffizi was me. Did I feel so incredibly special when I, escorted by a uniformed docent, walked speedily past the inert glut of sweating humans in the “regular admission” queue? I did. The high was such that I went to the Uffizi four times, not because I wanted to go to the Uffizi, but because I wanted to walk past all of those people waiting, and to watch them watch me not waiting. Not-waiting has been brisk theater for the inert members of the waiting class.

But on a consumer level, the specialness of the non-waiter has lately started to seem fraudulent. The internet has challenged the belief that not-waiting is a time dispensation reserved for elites. Those under a certain age have never waited for a song to play on the radio or for a show to air on TV. Not-waiting is like fast fashion — it disperses a formerly elite advantage among the masses, leaving the elite to flock to scarcity, to rarity, to ... waiting.

As in the days of the Tudors, waiting has regained some cachet. If everything is available at a click, what is not? For years, I heard the fashion lore about women on the wait list for the scarce supply of Birkin bags. (And only a superior few, like the ladies-in-waiting, are even permitted access to the wait list.) In New York, where I live, many restaurants have begun to refuse to take reservations. Now everyone must wait if they want to say they’ve eaten the latest hyped-up bowl of ramen. To have waited is now a point of pride, as if merely the act of standing in a queue counts as noble work.

Any futile status pursuit smacks a bit of Dr. Seuss’s Sneetches, those creatures that tried to create specialness among their ranks by furiously adding or removing stars from their bellies. But what if delayed gratification in the midst of all the gluttonous immediacy is more than just a trendy rebuke? Could it be an actual value corrective? Because it takes many hours to painstakingly hand-weave a single yard of a particular Pierre Frey tiger-print upholstery fabric, a decorator can be on the waiting list for more than a year. The list is made longer, of course, by the simple fact that there is a list — we want what others want — but that shouldn’t undermine the list’s original reason for being, which is that the most beautiful, highest-quality things cannot be crafted quickly.

Image

A photograph from the artist Uta Barth’s 1997 portfolio “... in passing.”CreditCourtesy of the artist; 1301 Pe, Los Angeles; and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm

And waiting, like boredom, can have an existential purpose. It can slow down the minutes and the hours; it can arguably, like medicine, extend and even improve your time on earth. Recently I put myself on the first waiting list of my life — for a brass choker by the designer Mona Kowalska of A Détacher. When the shopgirl added my name to the long list of waiting women, I felt both sheepishly unoriginal (clearly my desire did not mark me as unique) and oddly liberated. I just wanted this thing. It felt so good to proclaim my desire — to have it on the record — while waiting for the actual object to arrive. The future suddenly gained texture and specificity. Someday in that future I would be wearing this choker.

A few summers ago, I listened, while driving kids around, to a lot of contemporary pop songs. Many of the songs’ romantic hooks relied on old technology. People who had never in their life touched a radio dial were singing love songs about waiting for songs to be played on the radio. People who had never used a pay phone sang about running out of change and being unable to make a crucial, lovesick call. The immediate-gratification timetable clearly did not, or did not yet, work for heartache-y pop ballads. Yearning, one of the most poignant shared human experiences, percolates in the indeterminate void between the beginning of desire and the end of it (satiation or disappointment). Time spent fantasizing about — and sweetly agonizing over — the object of one’s desire heightens that desire.

Of course, waiting can be purely agonizing, too. Recently, I lost a beloved New York tree in a hurricane. It pained me to realize that if the city planted a new tree, I would not be alive to see it reach the height of its predecessor. Suddenly, I was staring death in the face. Waiting can be so uncomfortable, I realized, so seemingly worth any amount of money to evade, because, in the still dimly active primitive headquarters of our brains, waiting forces us to reckon with the fact that we have only a limited time on earth.

Consider a project by the Dutch artist Maarten Baas, called “200 Years.” Baas is planting a forest of tiny saplings that won’t mature until long after he dies: a work of art that won’t be finished for two centuries. If you will be dead before a waiting period concludes, you aren’t technically waiting for anything at all. Waiting becomes meaningless. Baas is making a literal mark on the future that none of us will be alive to witness. His is a complicated act of artistic selflessness and artistic hubris. But it brings to mind, perhaps, what we should be caring about — the future of the world we will leave behind. Perhaps this kind of thinking will become the trend in a post-waiting world, as we try to determine what can still make us feel.

Correction:Aug. 21, 2016

An article on Page 174 this weekend about the idea of waiting for things as a cultural trend misstates the English period when a lady-in-waiting could become the king’s mistress or wife. It was possible during the Tudor era in England, as well as other eras, but not during the Elizabethan period. (There were no kings of England during the Elizabethan era.)